Apocalypse Ink Productions is proud to announce they have acquired CROSS CUTTING, the novella trilogy (THE THIN, THE HOLLOW, THE MARROW) from Wendy Hammer. This dark urban fantasy is set in contemporary Indiana.

ABOUT CROSS CUTTING'S MAIN CHARACTER:Trinidad O’Laughlin is a Walker. She has the power to magically bond with a place and call to it for aid, but without a territory to call her own—she’s adrift. Trinidad grew up on the shores of her namesake island and in Ireland, but it’s cities that call to her. Trinidad travels to Indiana in search of a home and the possibility for romance with Achilles Vetrov, a clairvoyant bass player she knew years ago.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Wendy Hammer grew up in Wisconsin. She has English degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Ball State University. She now teaches literature and composition at a community college. Her stories can be found in Pantheon Magazine’s anthology Gaia: Shadows and Breath, on Liquid Imagination, and in Plasma Frequency. Another will appear in the forthcoming anthology: Suspended in Dusk (Books of the Dead Press). Wendy lives in West Lafayette, Indiana with her husband.

Check out the new RPG Bard Kickstarter project. RPG Bard allows authors and GMs to create beautiful roleplaying game books for D&D 5.0, 4.0, 3.5, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, and other game systems, then save them out to PDF for immediate use, sharing, or online, print, or print-on-demand sales. Our book "Industry Talk: An Insider's Look at Writing RPGs and Editing Anthologies" by Origins award-winning author Jennifer Brozek will be part of the backer rewards, along with four titles from other award-winning authors.

Speculative fiction covers a very broad range of literature from sword and board fantasy to the monsters that keep you up at night. Most of the time a story will be pretty clear cut as to what it can be classified as, but some stories sit in between two genres.

When we think of magic, many people think of brightly colored fairies who grant wishes. Bad things don’t happen when magic is involved, does it?

Horror might seem simple, but it’s one of the most complicated genres to write. It’s a genre of making you care about someone or something then yanking it away leaving the reader shaken.

What happens when you mix the two?

Imagine a story where fairies trick children into leaving their homes and take them back to the hollow hills only to be slowly devoured by the very creatures that promised to save them from a dull normal life. Or, murder victims have been found in the city and it’s up to a detective to not only find the murder but stop him before he completes his rituals to open a portal of darkness.

Stories like these can be classified as either fantasy or horror but most often sit in a sub-genre called dark fantasy. Dark fantasy combines elements of the fantasy genre such as magic with darker elements such as monsters. Often these stories have a more grim setting and very little humor. Dark fantasies also often have a sense of urgency, as things must be stopped before it is too late.

While the term dark fantasy is probably relatively new, the genre isn’t. The original Brother’s Grimm stories were as dark and fantastic as they come. Many of our modern fairy tales are softened renditions of these dark stories. H. P. Lovecraft wrote about magic and monsters in his tales. If you’ve read Elric of Melnibone, you’ve tasted the dark words of Michael Moorcock. Even Stephen King has dabbled in dark fantasy in his Dark Tower series. Many movies such as Pan’s Labyrinth, the Dark Crystal, and Legend also deal with magic and dark themes.

Like much of speculative fiction, dark fantasy gives us glimpses not only into fantastical worlds but the strength of the human spirit as it faces surmountable odds. These stories gives us hope that even when things seem darkest, persistence and hope can turn things around. It’s an important thing to remember when we look at our world today.

So if you like magical elements and dark themes give some dark fantasy stories a chance. Perhaps you’ll find a new favorite genre to enjoy.

Apocalypse Ink Productions will be at Origins Game Fair with a table in the Library in the dealers hall. Jennifer Brozek and Dylan Birtolo will also be at Origins in the Library and on panels in the Writers Symposium. Be sure to come by, say hello, and get a book signed!

I thought a lot, yesterday, about how to make a professional blog post about the death of one of our authors, Jay Lake. In the end, I think the personal blog post I made just hours after I discovered that Jay had passed is the best thing I could have written.

“I do not want to read this on Tor.com. I do not want to write this about Jay. I don’t. I really don’t. But I have no choice. Jay is dead.

He wrote for me. My first anthology, Grants Pass, when I was nothing and no one. He wrote for me every single time I asked him to. For the Edge of Propinquity. For small press anthologies and large.

He was my mentor for years before I published his non-fiction book, Jay Lake’s Process of Writing. We talked by phone, by Skype, and at conventions. He was generous with his time and his advice. It was this wealth of knowledge that led me to ask him if AIP could publish a non-fiction book. It was then I learned so much more from him.

I can’t help but feel for his family, Bronwyn, Lisa, and the rest of those family members—by choice and blood—whose names I just can’t remember though the tears.

All I can remember is how good he was to me and how much I’m going to miss him.

Radcon 2009 - Not the first time I met him in person but close to.

JayWake 2013.”

All of us at AIP will miss Jay. Our hearts and sincere condolences go out to his family.